Another thought just crossed my mind: in the 'user.cfg' file are options to adjust movement key accelleration and deceleration and velocity. These are:

MoveKeyAccel TurnKeyDecel Velocity presets

So it would be very easy to adjust those parameters for smoother ship control, so we get a very gradual increase/decrease in speed. The ctrl+mouse-wheel controls the incremental velocity presets, so players can set thier own speeds. It's a simple setup, and could make for a nice basic flight control system.

I've messed around with them a bit but I haven't gotten any good controls yet. Doesn't seem like I can bind a key more than two inputs. I wanted to try and simplify space flight.

Edit:

I remapped and "simplified" the spaceship controls to the numpad. You can still use the old method of WASD. Only issue is the acceleration and deceleration when using numpad, have to use mouse wheel first to get a good speed setup. Edit: Fixed that by setting the next and previous velocities to the Num 1 and Num 3 keys.

I may have a couple of suggestion. First off trying to orbit the Earth or any other object bigger is a little hard and I have had some trouble trying to do this. I have even thought about using the inverse-square equation to orbit the starship around earth, however I have no idea if this game is accurate in Earth Gravitational constant. I have no idea if this is far fetched, however It would be nice if there were some sort of controls, or even options that you could press and it would put you in an automatic orbit around earth or mars. And even option for elliptical orbits, geosynchronous, or even geostationary orbits.

Some other future ideas could be 3d cockpit that has controls buttons on the inside of your control panel. Also even a way to build your own spaceship at ease.

Blueplanet, SpaceEngineer has already said that he plans to implement all of those ideas in the future. Spacecraft in this version are only an experimental feature. As for the physics, they are accurate already.

Space Engine is a game of exploration. I like 'context menus' in the game, are the planets, stars, asteroids, etc.. My suggestion is that the ships have mobility like RTS games, or click on a certain specific point and let it sail with adjustable speed. To 'travel' without references, using the 'map' and a 'grid' created from the ship or the space axes (x, y, z).

I like this kind of movement because it gives us freedom of observation. Multiple cameras can be used as well.

My thinking is that, considering we have aircraft today that are essentially held aloft by advanced computer systems to calculate the required corrections of the control surfaces in real time (i.e. B-2 'Spirit', F-118 'Nighthawk'), it would seem only (highly) logical to extrapolate to a point in the future where space flight and exploration is more-or-less commonplace where similar systems would be installed on spacecraft. This is true especially on larger vessels with numerous crew since, while leaving crazy whack-job pilots to fly their personal craft in assistance-free mode, I for one would not enjoy being on a ship that is entirely at the mercy of the pilot's ability to make very complex calculations significantly fast and it would only make sense to me that such a vessel would have self-correcting systems to avoid/prevent pilot error. (Suppose the pilot is having a serious depression on account of travelling through the dark void of space for 6 months and decides to end it - ship and all...) It shouldn't have to take much more than a bunch of gravimetric sensors, accelerometers and RADAR (or similar) to produce sufficiently accurate short-range trajectory predictions and situational awareness for the ships systems. Long distance mapping of bodies (that is, the ones with enough mass to significantly influence the flightpath) would provide for hyperspace calculations. Feed this data back to the pilot via the HUD and you're just about set...

tl;dr : Basically what I'm saying is, while I understand SE's desire to use a realistic flight model (which is perfectly compatible with this - I don't see any reason why not to allow for disengaging assisted flight for the purposes of the game), it wouldn't really make sense to expose most users to the complexity of making real-time calculations in a system they are entirely unfamiliar with (assuming they're not astro-/cosmonauts, of course).. Hell, even modern cargo and tanker ships are steered via a tiny little joystick (no really, it's about the size of a thumb...) and computers, so why not my 50-to-200-years-in-the-future interstellar spacecraft?

There's no need to take out the realism and complexity - just don't make it a necessity to the gameplay (Planetarium mode does not count...).

F-117, which is retired. All fly-by-wire aircraft operate on that principle. All modern military aircraft, particularly jet fighters, are designed that way. The same was true of the space shuttle.

Anyway, SpaceEngineer has already said a few times that an assisted flight mode will be available, so that calculations can be made by computer and the human operator just provides input. It is a good idea, and definitely should be implemented (if it was all as difficult as Orbiter, no one would get anywhere in SE )

I would like to suggest ship controls, vary similar to X3 Terran Conflict controls.

Scrolls Wheel: Will accelerate and de-accelerate the ship's speed. You can also go back words in the negative acceleration if desired.

2 ways to navigate. Pressing the space bar will toggle mouse navigation. Similer to using the arrow keys but you can have full control though the mouse when steering the ship. Toggling the space bar again will de-activate the mouse control. But you can still use the arrow keys or bind them to your style for steering the ship. You can also use "Shift +" or Shift -" for setting the amount of acceleration. Like going from miles to ParSec, ect.

Now it would be cool if you could eject out of your ship. So you can go around your ship and take a look at it from a man scale perspective but this walking on planets is a long awaited feature. We wont see that until who knows how long.

Also it would be nice to have a cockpit view of the ship. It would be even more nice, if it was a mother ship of sorts, you can exit the controls of the cockpit and walk around the ship and explore its corridors.

Another thing for navigating, would be a map mode for navigating the universe or solar system. Like it will tell you what stars or planets are closest to you. And you can have options selecting them. One would be to set a aid to help people properly land on the planet. When you want to descend to a planet, it will calculate the trajectory you half to enter from and the right speed. How people can see this is though a holographic like gates. The "gates" will show you where you half to pass though in-order to descend into the planet with out blowing your ship up. Also the gates will be colored. If you are going to fast, the gates will highlight in red, telling you to slow down, if the gates are green, then you have the right speed.

So to put things in a general overview. _____________________________________ Scroll Wheel: Accelerates Ship. De-Accelerate Ship. Space Bar: Toggle mouse navigation controls. Shift +: Accelerate up 1 unit of speed Shift - : De-Accelerate down to 1 unit of speed Shift C: Opens the navigation map. Shift Q: Ejects the person from their ship Shift W: "If in a mother ship" Will release the player from there cockpit; freely to explore the mother ship. Up Arrow: Decend the nose of the space craft to go down. Down Arrow: Raise the nose of the space craft to go up. Left Arrow: Go left. Right Arrow: Go Right.

Alernitive to controls for navigating.

W: Decend the nose of the space craft to go down. S: Raise the nose of the space craft to go up. A: Go left. D: Go right Q: Lean the ship to its side on the left. [ This control can still work when using mouse navigation and arrow keys] E: Lean the ship to its side on the right. [ This control can still work when using mouse navigation and arrow keys]

I wanted to keep the control scheme easy and intuitive as possible. I think many players that these controlls would be best suited. At least I hope.

"The sky calls to us, If we do not destroy our self's. We will one day, venture to the stars" - Carl Sagan

Movement/GUI keys may have completely different bindings. Walking inside the ship and going out to space is not supported yet, and will not be supported in the next version. So it is too early to speak about it.

Oh I do understand that the feature of getting out of your ship and stepping your foot on a planet is a feature that we may not even see, But I just brought it up as a wish list type. Should have made it more clear, sorry about that.

"The sky calls to us, If we do not destroy our self's. We will one day, venture to the stars" - Carl Sagan

General "post all X feedback here" threads should probably be stickied.

This is not a "post all X feedback" thread, this is just about spaceship control schemes. If we had sickies for every single thread on every single topic, then every thread would be stickied and there would be no point. What you should do instead is use the search function as suggested in the forum rules.